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fight the Austrian troops. Fourteen days after Augusto Mortara’s birth, Duke Francesco V of Modena fled his duchy. By the end of March, the Austrian troops had been driven from both Milan and Venice, and provisional governments were formed to replace the old regimes. King Carl Albert decided to send his soldiers to Lombardy, hoping to rout the Austrians and expand his kingdom. Newly installed governments from Modena to Venice deliberated the annexation of their lands to the Sardinian kingdom, to make Carl Albert the king of all Italy. By the beginning of April, volunteers from Modena and Bologna were heading north to join the war against the Austrians.
    The war for national unification, the end of foreign rule, and the achievement of a state based on constitutional principles guaranteeing basic rights to its citizenry were initially viewed by most partisans of Italian unification as having the Pope’s blessing. When he had assumed the papacy two years earlier, Pius IX had been widely regarded as a champion of reform and modernity. Some, indeed, had imagined that he would serve as honorary head of a confederation of constitutional states that would together make up the Italian nation. These hopes were dashed for good, however, when, at the end of April 1848, Pius IX announced his opposition to involvement of the Papal States in the war against the Austrians. In Rome and throughout the Papal States, the rebels found that they had a new target: the pope-king himself.
    In Bologna, enthusiasm for the war against Austria ran high, while the Pope’s announcement of late April undermined the moderates, who had been preaching the compatibility of a united Italy with continued papal rule. When, later in the spring, Austrian troops began to take the offensive and news of the first reverses of the Piedmontese forces began to come in, Bologna was in turmoil. Increasing numbers of defeated soldiers flooded into the city, and reports that Austrian troops were heading for Modena and Romagna left the population nervous and afraid.
    In early August, the Austrians marched into Modena and reinstated the duke. They then moved on to Bologna, where, after a fierce battle against a rapidly mustered, largely civilian force, they were repulsed from the city. Tales of the Austrians’ cruelty as they retreated—sacking houses and killing people on the way—fueled popular hatred.
    Rome’s increasingly tenuous hold on Bologna gave way in the fall when, following the assassination of his prime minister and facing the threat of a popular uprising, Pope Pius IX fled Rome and the Papal States altogether,seeking refuge in Gaeta, a fortified coastal town north of Naples. Demonstrations in Bologna forced the conservative city council to resign. In February 1849, following Giuseppe Garibaldi’s arrival in Rome, the victorious rebels announced the birth of a new Roman Republic, while in Bologna there appeared the first decree of the Roman Constitutional Assembly:
Article I. The papacy’s rule and temporal power over the Roman State is declared over.
Article II. The Roman Pontiff will have all the guarantees necessary for his exercise of spiritual authority.
Article III. The form of the government of the Roman State will be pure democracy, and will take the glorious name of the Roman Republic.
    In Bologna—although conservatives warned of impending anarchy—demonstrators rushed to the city’s public buildings, removed the papal insignias from their portals, piled them up in the middle of Piazza Maggiore, and lit a great fire. 15
    Three days later, Bologna’s newly elected council proclaimed the city’s proud adherence to the Roman Republic. But however joyous the night of celebration that followed, it could not hide the widespread conviction that, in the face of opposition from the Austrians as well as the French, the new government would not last long.
    Indeed, Bologna had little defense, other than its wall, against the Austrian troops who, in the